Pa. native explores Afghanistan's people through film

Sam French has returned to the Main Line, a world away from his adopted home — war-ravaged Kabul.

“It’s good to be home,” declared French, sipping a latte from a wide-brimmed cup in a Bryn Mawr cafe on a recent overcast Monday.

He is home to visit friends and family for the holidays, but also for the Philadelphia premier of his new independent short film, “Buzkashi Boys,” a coming-of-age piece shot entirely in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

“It’s been an incredible journey and incredible process,” French said, looking every part the filmmaker, a rugged-looking man of 30-something donning wavy grayish-brown hair and beard and clad in boots, faded jeans, open-buttoned blue-striped shirt and grey North Face jacket. ”There’s a hunger there to tell Afghan stories.”

French will show the half-hour film at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Saturday, Dec. 22, at 11 a.m.

Born in 1976, French grew up on North Gulph Road in Wayne in a home built by his mom and dad in 1974. His father, also named Sam French, who passed away in 1994, was an architect who operated a boutique firm, Sam and Crane, in Ardmore. His mother, Mary, still lives in the home.

He attended Episcopal Academy, where he played squash and his mom was a longtime teacher. One of his favorite after-school hangouts was Showcase Comics in Bryn Mawr. His boyhood dream was to one day become an astronaut and fly the first mission to mars.

After graduating from Episcopal in 1994 he majored in English at Williams College. After graduation he went to New York to start a film career. He moved in 2002 to Los Angeles to hone his skills at USC’s film school, graduating in 2006. He stuck around after graduation to “try to make it in Hollywood.” French went on to direct “Over the Line,” which won multiple awards, including Best Actor and Best Director at the Beverly Hills Film Festival.

In 2008 he became smitten with a British woman who worked for the British government. She eventually got assigned to the British Embassy in Kabul. He followed his girlfriend.

“I decided to go and visit her,” he said, and “I found a place I did not expect.”

At first he thought he would be sequestered in a bunker for the duration of his stay. Instead, he encountered a bustling, complex society.

He embraced them and wanted to tell their stories as a filmmaker. He wanted the world to know Afghanistan is more than a place of “bombs, bullets and burkas.”

So he returned to the United States to place his possessions in storage and relocate permanently to Afghanistan as a writer and director.

He co-founded Development Pictures to create productions for NGO’s (non-government organizations) such as relief and charitable organizations like Unicef.

He soon realized that cinema in Kabul lacked substance as its handful of theaters (most were destroyed by the Taliban) showed Bollywood fare as well as other foreign films.

So he collaborated with Ariel Nasr and Leslie Knott to found the Afghan Film Project, a nonprofit organization to promote and mentor Afghanistan’s fledging film industry and the telling of uniquely Afghan stories.

“What we’re trying to do is foster a home-grown film industry,” explained French.

They recruited nine international film professionals to serve as mentors to about a dozen young Afghan filmmakers. Their first project was “Buzkashi Boys.”

The film, of which he co-wrote the screenplay for, is set amid the stark urban landscapes of contemporary Kabul and centers around two smudge-faced best friends, one a charismatic street urchin and the other the son of a blacksmith. Both children dream of someday playing the national sport of buzkashi, a brutal game similar to horse polo but played with a goat carcass.

“We cheer because every Buzkashi rider in Afghanistan is a hero,” exclaimed a character in the film during a match played in a snowstorm.

French’s colleague Nasr, an Afghan Canadian documentary filmmaker, was able to procure the cooperation of the Afghan government, which afforded the production crew police protection during filming. They had permission to film at such locales as the Darul Aman Palace, the former parliament building now a bombed-shattered shell.

“He pulled off miracles,” French said about Nasr’s savvy to cut across red tape.

The crew of 50 obtained a Soviet-era crane and dolly for filming.

French and his associates conducted an exhausted search in Afghanistan to cast two children as the lead. They selected one child, the son of a noted filmmaker, who brought some acting experience. The other child cast for the film was discovered hawking maps on “Chicken Street,” a street popular with trinket sellers.

“I wanted them to have a very naturalistic acting style,” the director explained. “I wanted them to be themselves.”

The reason the film project was a short and not feature-length was to keep to a minimum the duration of on-location shooting. “We took a lot of security precautions,” he recalled, including not divulging set locations ahead of time.

“Buzkashi Boys” has been short-listed for an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film, and was well received at 2012 film festivals around the world, winning awards for Best Short (Evolution International Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival and Savannah Film Festival) and Best Cinematography (Rhode Island International Film Festival, UK Film Festival), and Best Drama (LA Shorts Festival).

“All of our Afghan trainees and crew are terribly excited about the whole thing,” related French.

French will be spending the holidays with his mother and younger sister, Katherine, who works at a sustainable beauty product company in Lima, Peru. After his home-coming he will be visiting friends in New York and then traveling to Los Angeles, where the Academy Award nominations will be announced Jan. 10, he said.

When he heads back to Kabul he will work on establishing an annual film festival to showcase local films, convene film panels and distribute grants. He is committed to continue his romance with this mystical, ancient land. His love affair with the British embassy worker is, however, a slice of his life on the cutting-room floor. She has since departed for the West.

Living in a guesthouse in a peaceful residential section of Kabul, he said the Taliban no longer have a presence in the city. But danger does exist, and the filmmaker talks about the precautions he takes when he is out on Kabul’s dust-clogged streets. Coordinated terrorist attacks are uncommon, he remarked, and aimed primarily at government–related installations. On Monday, the same day of his interview with Main Line Media News, sister paper to The Mercury, Western media reported a car bomb exploded outside a compound housing a U.S. military contractor, killing two Afghan workers and injuring more than a dozen others.

But the filmmaker is not interested in basing his work on news headlines. Once the smoke dissipates it becomes clear that there is more to the story of Afghanistan than conflict. He wants films such as “Buzkashi Boys” to influence Western perceptions of this impoverished country, where “everyday people struggle heroically to build better lives for themselves.”

“The Kabul I see every day is not the same Kabul you see on the news,” he stressed.

Doors open for the Dec. 22 screening of “Buzkashi” at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, at 11 a.m. The screening starts at 11:30 a.m. and a question and answer session with refreshments with the director begins at noon. Admission to the screening is free but to benefit the Afghan Film Project donations will be accepted, and DVDs and posters will be available for purchase. Donations can also be made through Paypal at www.buzkashiboys.com.